"With the AI Alliance We deliberately rely on open AI models and a strong community that jointly and responsibly researches relevant AI for society and develops it together with industry partners,"
says Prof. Sami Haddadin, which TUM as a scientific partner in the AI Alliance. Together, the participating companies, institutions, and universities aim to develop a kind of "Linux for AI" on an open source basis.
Ecosystem for open foundation models
TUM President Prof. Thomas F. Hofmann emphasizes:
“With this alliance, we aim to accelerate the development of responsible, socially acceptable, and scalable AI solutions in partnership with other leading universities and companies.”
And the Director IBM Research Zurich and Vice President Europe and Africa, Alessandro Curioni from IBM, explains:
"AI has drastically changed our world and will continue to do so, advancing our society. To ensure we can continue to push the boundaries of cutting-edge AI development and applications responsibly, transparently, and openly, we must work together."
International & powerful network
The AI Alliance's mission is to create an ecosystem for open foundation models, develop efficient and powerful software frameworks and tools, and leverage the hardware ecosystem as an accelerator for new software approaches. Or as Haddadin puts it:
"Join forces and do something cool. It's about defining and driving projects together in a very straightforward way, within a super international network that's very powerful."
TUM boasts leading expertise in AI-based robotics and AI-supported knowledge acquisition, as well as unique data from its Living Labs KI.Fabrik, the Geriatronics Campus, and, in the future, the TUM Center for Embodied Laboratory Intelligence (ELI). It can also contribute the knowledge of pure AI institutes such as the Georg Nemetschek Institute – AI for the Built Word. IBM, co-initiator of the AI alliance, plans to contribute its extensive expertise to develop and refine multimodal base models. The company is building on its decades of experience in cutting-edge research, language models for recognition, neural network architectures, and data-driven innovations. A first collaborative project between IBM and TUM is scheduled to launch in the coming months.
